In Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili’s Georgia, her second solo exhibition at Galerie Molitor opening on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin, a recurrent female form surfaces and recedes. The group of new photographs that comprise the exhibition hinge on the delayed discovery of a close relative named Georgia via an ancestry genealogy test. Loosely reflecting on questions of the doppelganger, the muse, the unknown other, Alexi-Meskhishvili conveys the way in which photography is uniquely equipped to convey how such encounters with the unknown fracture, undo, reorient usual perceptions of reality. The aluminium dye sublimations and analogue C-prints that comprise the exhibition emerged from Alexi-Meskhishvili’s imaginative ‘camera-less’ method, an idiosyncratic melding of analogue and digital techniques that conveys a deep understanding of photography as a porous medium with unstable boundaries. The works began as instagram screenshots, which Alexi-Meskhishvili digitally altered then printed onto transparent rice paper, collaged and placed onto blank large-format negatives, which she then exposed with colorful finger lights. As such, the resulting abstracted compositions, with their resounding reds and yellows, shadowy streaks and wisps of white, are at once a product of chance, and of the hyper-controlled environment which allows these accidents to happen. A parallel tension in tone emerges between the obfuscated, fragile quality of the analogue C-prints and the indestructible aluminum dye-sublimations, which invigorate the images with gleaming directness.
By working around the nominally static quality of the medium, Alexi-Meskhishvili choreographs color in a way that is at once haptic and elusive. Alongside her perennial return to floral forms, here, fragments of a recurrent female figure wade through an abstracted chromatic emulsion. Where Alexi-Meskhishvili works against traditional conceptions of photography as capturing reality, she remains invested in its relationship to realness, as she grazes some ineffable quality of life.
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